Wolf Hall | Hilary Mantel | Macmillan Hilary Mantel WINNER OF THE 2009 MAN BOOKER PRIZE WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell: a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people, and implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph? In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is "a darkly brilliant reimagining of life under Henry VIII. . . . Magnificent." (The Boston Globe).

Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction - Nominee, Walter Scott Prize Winner, Audie Award Winner, Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction Winner, Man Booker Prize Winner, National Book Critics Circle Awards Winner CONNECT WITH PUTNEY, 1500 So now get up." Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned toward the gate, as if... Watch Trailer for Wolf Hall (BBC/PBS Masterpiece) Watch the trailer for Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall! Wolf Hall premieres January 21st on BBC 2 in the UK and April 5th on PBS Masterpiece in the USA. Reviews Praise for Wolf Hall “Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is a startling achievement, a brilliant historical novel focused on the rise to power of a figure exceedingly unlikely, on the face of things, to arouse any sympathy at all . . . . This is a novel too in which nothing is wasted, and nothing completely disappears.” —Stephen Greenblatt, The New York Review of Books “Nothing in the last few years has dazzled me more than Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. . . .

Magnificent.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love “On the origins of this once-world-shaking combat, with its still-vivid acerbity and cruelty, Hilary Mantel has written a historical novel of quite astonishing power. . . . With breathtaking subtlety--one quite ceases to notice the way in which she takes on the most intimate male habits of thought and speech--Mantel gives us a Henry who is sexually pathetic, and who needs a very down-to-earth counselor. . . . The means by which Mantel grounds and anchors her action so convincingly in the time she describes, while drawing so easily upon the past and hinting so indirectly at the future, put her in the very first rank of historical novelists. . . . Wolf Hall is a magnificent service to the language and literature whose early emancipation it depicts and also, in its demystifying of one of history's wickedest men, a service to the justice that Josephine Tey first demanded in The Daughter of Time.” —Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic “Whether we accept Ms Mantel's reading of history or not, her characters have a lifeblood of their own . . . . a Shakespearean vigour.

Stylistically, her fly-on-the-wall approach is achieved through the present tense, of which she is a master. Her prose is muscular, avoiding cod Tudor dialogue and going for direct modern English. The result is Ms Mantel's best novel yet.” —The Economist “A novel both fresh and finely wrought: a brilliant portrait of a society in the throes of disorienting change, anchored by a penetrating character study of Henry's formidable advisor, Thomas Cromwell. It's no wonder that her masterful book just won this year's Booker Prize . . . [Mantel's prose is] extraordinarily flexible, subtle, and shrewd.” —Wendy Smith, The Washington Post “A huge book, in its range, ambition . . . in its success. [Mantel's] interest is in the question of good and evil as it applies to people who wield great power. That means anguish, exultation, deals, spies, decapitations, and fabulous clothes . . . She always goes for color, richness, music. She has read Shakespeare closely. One also hears the accents of the young James Joyce.” —Joan Acocella, The New Yorker “Dazzling . . .

.Thomas Cromwell remains a controversial and mysterious figure. Mantel has filled in the blanks plausibly, brilliantly. Wolf Hall has epic scale but lyric texture. Its 500-plus pages turn quickly, winged and falconlike . . . . both spellbinding and believable.” —Christopher Benfey, The New York Times Book Review “Mantel's abilities to channel the life and lexicon of the past are nothing short of astonishing. She burrows down through the historical record to uncover the tiniest, most telling details, evoking the minutiae of history as vividly as its grand sweep. The dialogue is so convincing that she seems to have been, in another life, a stenographer taking notes in the taverns and palaces of England.” —Ross King, Los Angeles Times “Darkly magnificent . . . Instead of bringing the past to us, her writing, brilliant and black, launches us disconcertingly into the past. We are space-time travelers landed in an alien world . . . history is a feast whose various and vital excitements and intrigues make the book a long and complex pleasure.” —Richard Eder, The Boston Globe “Arch, elegant, richly detailed . . .

[Wolf Hall's] main characters are scorchingly well rendered. And their sharp-clawed machinations are presented with nonstop verve in a book that can compress a wealth of incisiveness into a very few well-chosen words . . . Deft and diabolical as they are, Ms. Mantel's slyly malicious turns of phrase . . . succinctly capture the important struggles that have set her characters talking.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Brilliant . . . A provocative, beautifully written book that ends much too soon.” —The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) “The essential Mantel element . . . is a style--of writing and of thinking--that combines steely-eyed intelligence with intense yet wide-ranging sympathy. This style implies enormous respect for her readers, as if she believes that we are as intelligent and empathetic as she is, and one of the acute pleasures of reading her books is that we sometimes find ourselves living up to those expectations. . . . If you are anything like me, you will finish Wolf Hall wishing it were twice as long as its 560 pages.

Torn away from this sixteenth-century world, in which you have come to know the engaging, pragmatic Cromwell as if he were your own brother--as if he were yourself--you will turn to the Internet to find out more about him . . . But none of this, however instructive will make up for your feeling of loss, because none of this additional material will come clothed in the seductive, inimitable language of Mantel's great fiction.” —Wendy Lesser, Bookforum “Mantel sets a new standard for historical fiction with her latest novel Wolf Hall, a riveting portrait of Thomas Cromwell . . . Mantel's crystalline style, piercing eye and interest in, shall we say, the darker side of human nature, together with a real respect for historical accuracy, make this novel an engrossing, enveloping read.” —BookPage “The story of Cromwell's rise shimmers in Ms. Mantel's spry intelligent prose . . .

[Mantel] leaches out the bones of the story as it is traditionally known, and presents to us a phantasmagoric extravaganza of the characters' plans and ploys, toils and tactics.” —Washington Times “Historical fiction at its finest, Wolf Hall captures the character of a nation and its people. It exemplifies something that has lately seemed as mythical as those serpent princesses: the great English novel.” —Bloomberg News “Inspired . . . there are no new stories, only new ways of telling them. Set during Henry VIII's tumultuous, oft-covered reign, this epic novel . . . proves just how inspired a fresh take can be. [Mantel] is an author as audacious as Anne [Boleyn] herself, imagining private conversations between public figures and making it read as if she had a glass to the wall.” —People Magazine (four stars, People Pick) “A deft, original, but complicated novel. Fans of historical fiction--or great writing--should howl with delight.” —USA Today “[Mantel] wades into the dark currents of 16th century English politics to sculpt a drama and a protagonist with a surprisingly contemporary feel . . .

Wolf Hall is sometimes an ambitious read. But it is a rewarding one as well.” —Marjorie Kehe, The Christian Science Monitor “This masterwork is full of gems for the careful reader. The recurring details alone . . . shine through like some kind of Everyman's poetry. Plainspoken and occasionally brutal, Wolf Hall is both as complex and as powerful as its subject, as messy as life itself.” —Clea Simon, The Boston Phoenix “Reader, you're in excellent hands with Hilary Mantel . . . for this thrumming, thrilling read. . . . Part of the delight of masterfully paced Wolf Hall is how utterly modern it feels. It is political intrigue pulsing with energy and peopled by historical figures who have never seemed more alive--and more human.” —Ellen Kanner, Miami Herald “Wolf Hall is a solid historical novel that's also a compelling read . . . Mantel's narrative manages to be both rich and lean: there's plenty of detail, but it's not piled in endless paragraphs.

The plot flows swiftly from one development to the next.” —David Loftus, The Oregonian “[Mantel] seamlessly blends fiction and history and creates a stunning story of Tudor England . . . . With its excellent plotting and riveting dialogue, Wolf Hall is a gem of a novel that is both accurate and gripping.” —Cody Corliss, St. Louis Post-Dispatch “[A] spirited novel . . . . Mantel has a solid grasp of court politics and a knack for sharp, cutting dialogue.” —Thom Geier, Entertainment Weekly “This is in all respects a superior work of fiction, peopled with appealing characters living through a period of tense high drama‚There will be few novels this year as good as this one.” —Library Journal, starred review “Mixing fiction with fact, Mantel captures the atmosphere of the times and brings to life the important players.” —Publishers Weekly In the Press Book Review: Booker Prize-winner 'Wolf Hall' by Hilary Mantel Henry VIII's quest to make Anne Boleyn his queen has inspired reams of historical fiction,much of it trashy and most of it trite.

Yet from this seemingly shopworn material,Hilary Mantel has created a novel both fresh and finely wrought: a brilliant portrait of a society in the throes of disorienting change,anchored by a penetrating character study of Henry's formidable advisor,Thomas Cromwell. - The Washington Post Martin Rubin reviews 'Wolf Hall,' a historical novel-recent winner of the Man Booker prize for fiction-that presents Henry VIII's minister Thomas Cromwell in a new light. - The Wall Street Journal Reviews from Goodreads Tudor Times | Who's Who in Wolf Hall / Politics & Economy Who's Who in Wolf Hall Wolf Hall is the eagerly anticipated dramatisation of Hilary Mantel's two great Booker Prize winning novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, a fictional interpretation of the life of Thomas Cromwell, minister to Henry VIII. The number of characters involved and the intricacies of Henry VIII's court, where the main body of the action is set are complex, so we have written short biographies of the many people with whose lives Cromwell's was entwined.

Wolf Hall is a work of fiction, although extensively researched, and therefore Mantel's interpretations of character and motivation are not always the same as previous portrayals of the same individuals – her reading of Sir Thomas More's character being the obvious challenge to previous portrayals. We have noted some non-fiction works about key characters. Women are listed under their maiden names, as many married more than once. An Attainder was an Act of Parliament condemning the accused of treason, without trial. To show the number of people executed (hanged, beheaded or burnt) during the period, we have put a block and axe next to the entries of people who died that way - it's scarey! BBC - Wolf Hall - Media Centre Media Centre Wolf Hall A major adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novels I am excited to see this world-class team come together for the adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s phenomenal books, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies.

This collaboration demonstrates the ambition of BBC Two drama and once again takes the scale of our content up another notchBen Stephenson, Controller, Drama Commissioning Date: 02.01.2015 Last updated: 02.01.2015 at 12.11 Category: BBC Two ; Drama Two-time Olivier and three-time Tony Award winner Mark Rylance is Thomas Cromwell in a major adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies for BBC Two and Masterpiece on PBS. "Once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, once you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect. Before you even glance in his direction, you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought, his heir under your protection, his money in your strong room and his dog running to your whistle.

Before he wakes in the morning, you should have the axe in your hand." Bafta-winning director Peter Kosminsky (The Government Inspector, The Promise) directs the flagship drama that presents an intimate portrait of Thomas Cromwell, the brilliant consigliere to King Henry VIII, as he manoeuvres the corridors of power at the Tudor court. The story follows the complex machinations and back room dealings of this pragmatic and accomplished power broker – from humble beginnings and an enigmatic past – who must serve king and country while navigating deadly political intrigue, the King’s tempestuous relationship with Anne Boleyn and the religious upheavals of the Protestant reformation. Oscar-nominated Peter Straughan (The Men Who Stare At Goats, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) has adapted both novels for the screen. Emmy-winner Damian Lewis is Henry VIII and Claire Foy (The Promise) plays the calculating and ambitious Anne Boleyn in the drama which is a Playground Entertainment and Company Pictures production.

Hilary Mantel says: "My expectations were high and have been exceeded: in the concision and coherence of the storytelling, in the originality of the interpretations, in the break from the romantic clichés of the genre, in the wit and style and heart. "The spirit of the books has been extraordinarily well preserved. The storytelling is fast and fluid, the characters compelling, the tone fits that of the novels, "Mark Rylance gives a mesmeric performance as Cromwell, its effect building through the series." Executive producer Colin Callender adds: "Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies were the first books I optioned when I launched Playground. I was captivated by Hilary Mantel’s provocative portrait of Thomas Cromwell - a figure from history traditionally portrayed as a two dimensional henchman but who in Hilary’s brilliant hands becomes a rich, complicated and enigmatic character. A man of lowly birth, navigating the deadly politics of the Tudor court and the moral complexities that accompany the exercise of power. “Just as Hilary reinvigorated the historical novel, her books have provided us with the opportunity to reinvigorate the historical television drama.

Modern audiences are interested in characters on both sides of the moral equation and in Cromwell we have a man trapped between his desire to do what is right and his instinct to survive. In truth it is a very contemporary story, a story of power, loyalty and betrayal that just happens to be about people 500 years ago.” Ben Stephenson, Controller, Drama Commissioning, says: “I am excited to see this world-class team come together for the adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s phenomenal books, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. This collaboration demonstrates the ambition of BBC Two drama and once again takes the scale of our content up another notch.” Wolf Hall is a co-production of Company Pictures (Elizabeth I, Shameless, The Devil's Whore, The Shadow Line) and Playground Entertainment (Dancing On The Edge, The Missing) - the New York and London-based production company helmed by Colin Callender - for BBC Two and Masterpiece (broadcaster and co-producers of Downton Abbey, Sherlock) in association with BBC Worldwide, Altus Media and Prescience.

Colin Callender executive produces for Playground, John Yorke for Company Pictures, Polly Hill, BBC Head of Independent Drama, for BBC Two, Rebecca Eaton for Masterpiece, Martin Rakusen and Ben Donald for BBC Worldwide and Tim Smith for Prescience and Altus Media. LV Thomas Cromwell: who should play him? - Telegraph Theatre Thomas Cromwell: who should play him? The name of the actor who will play Thomas Cromwell in the RSC's forthcoming adaptation of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies has not yet been announced. Paul Gent makes some suggestions. Who should play Thomas Cromwell in the RSC's adaptations? Photo: Alamy Image 1 of 2 Tudor portrait: author Hilary Mantel with her sequel to Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies Photo: Reuters/Luke Macgregor By Paul Gent 10:57AM GMT 25 Jan 2013 This week Greg Doran announced that one of the highlights of his first season as artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company will be a stage adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s acclaimed Booker Prize -winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.

What he didn’t announce was who is going to play the central character, Thomas Cromwell, which must be the most coveted role of the year. The Tudor period is a fascinating and turbulent one and Cromwell, the blacksmith’s son who rose to become Henry VIII’s chief minister, was right at the centre of it, organising marriages, divorces and beheadings for his capricious king. In Mantel’s hands, he becomes one of the most vividly realised figures in fiction – tough, manipulative, guarded, occasionally brutal yet capable of great kindness and gentleness. In fact he leaps off the page so vigorously that every reader will have a firm idea of which actor should play him. Here are a few suggestions. JIM CARTER BBC News - Can Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies match Wolf Hall? Can Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies match Wolf Hall? By Nick Higham BBC News Hilary Mantel talks to the BBC's Nick Higham about her new novel, Bring up the Bodies Mantel begins Wolf Hall sequel Booker Prize-winning author Hilary Mantel publishes the long-waited sequel to Wolf Hall this week. Can Bring Up The Bodies meet the high expectations of Mantel's fans, peers and literary critics?

Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall won the Booker Prize in 2009. Her 12th book, it catapulted her from the status of admired but often under-rated literary novelist to worldwide best-seller. A few found the book dense and unreadable; most found its intimate portrait of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's minister and fixer and one of the most feared and disliked characters in English history, simply irresistible. Now she's published a sequel. The good news for fans of Wolf Hall is that Bring Up The Bodies repeats the same trick with aplomb. It's a very good trick and well worth enjoying twice even if, inevitably, the follow-up doesn't have quite the same breathtaking originality as its predecessor. To say that Mantel has reinvented the historical novel is overstating it. But she has certainly reinvigorated an often tired and cliched genre. No-one in Wolf Hall or Bring Up The Bodies says "prithee", no bodices are ripped, no liberties are taken with the historical record.

Her Cromwell is not a modern man in Tudor costume but someone whose mental landscape is that of the early 16th Century: The tail end of the middle ages, just as the Protestant revolution was gaining speed. Bring Up The Bodies is the second novel in a trilogy about Thomas Cromwell Mantel's skill is in making the mind of someone operating in such a society accessible to contemporary readers, though it helps that the real Thomas Cromwell had some strikingly modern attitudes. In economics he was a Keynsian long before John Maynard Keynes himself. He believed the state had a responsibility to look after its poorest citizens. He was an accomplished politician. And it was Cromwell who turned the business of medieval government, run by officers of the king's household, into the forerunner of a recognisably modern bureaucracy, underpinned by Acts of Parliament. At 650 pages Wolf Hall is intimidatingly long. Originally Mantel planned to write a single book about Cromwell's rise and fall. It soon became clear, she says, that she had more than enough material for two. Then, "alarmingly late" in the process of writing the second book, she realised there would need to be three.

So Bring Up The Bodies is half the length of its predecessor and much narrower in focus. The first book traced Cromwell's career from childhood, through the death of his mentor and predecessor as Henry VIII's minister, Cardinal Wolsey. It ended with Henry's divorce from his first wife Catherine of Aragon (Katherine in Mantel's spelling) and his marriage to Anne Boleyn - a woman almost as manipulative as Cromwell himself. Good company The sequel covers just the nine months of Anne's downfall and execution, engineered by Cromwell on behalf of the Seymour family, who supplied Henry's third wife, Jane. Mantel's Cromwell is ruthless, it's true, but also sympathetic: A man of little education but wide experience and excellent taste, who can "draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury". Hilary Mantel 's Wolf Hall won awards in the UK and US He is a workaholic. He speaks several languages. He was once a soldier, later a banker and a lawyer and a cloth merchant: He can price a man's clothes just by looking at him.

He is a loving husband and father, kind to his servants and loyal to his master - at first Wolsey, later Henry. He is also vengeful, manipulative and cleverer by far than almost anyone else he encounters, including and especially the high-born aristocrats who surround Henry and who despise Cromwell on the grounds - absurd to modern eyes, but the universally accepted wisdom in the early 16th Century - that he is an upstart of humble birth, and that only they are fit to govern. Mantel is clearly fascinated by Cromwell: Both the historical figure, the son of a Putney blacksmith who rose to become Earl of Essex, and her fictional creation. She might have written the real man's biography, except that her trade is novel-writing and Cromwell is, as she says, "unbiographicable": We know a great deal about Cromwell the public man, mainly because his papers were seized and preserved before his execution. We know next to nothing about the private man. The novelist is able to go where the historian and biographer cannot, imagining what it might have been like to be Cromwell.

And he makes very good company for readers privileged to listen to his inner voice - though, in a stylistic tic which infuriates some, Mantel makes sure we simultaneously identify with Cromwell and keep our distance by referring always to her central character as "he", leading to occasional confusion as to who is speaking or acting. He's such good company, indeed, that it takes a while in Bring Up The Bodies before you realise quite how brutal he is. Mantel's object may be to rescue Cromwell the man from his historical reputation as a black-hearted villain: He was a survivor, a pragmatist whose aim was always to further the interests of his master the king. Yet in the most chilling scenes in the book he deliberately sets out to frame a series of men on charges of adultery with the queen. He questions them personally, with subtlety and a refined psychological cruelty worthy of the Inquisition (a medieval institution with whose strikingly modern interrogation techniques you feel Cromwell must have been familiar). Repressive dictatorships are said to enlist the support of otherwise decent people by ensnaring them little by little, each tiny compromise insignificant in itself but cumulatively damning.

By the end of Bring Up The Bodies the reader is in a similar position: seduced by Cromwell's charisma step-by-step into ready acceptance of his power, however unscrupulously he wields it. It's an impressive achievement. Bring Up The Bodies is out now in the UK in hardback, published by Fourth Estate. More on This Story Damian Lewis to play Wolf Hall's Henry VIII - BBC News BBC News Damian Lewis to play Wolf Hall's Henry VIII 8 May 2014 Close share panel Image caption The mini-series will be broadcast on BBC Two next year Damian Lewis will play Henry VIII in the forthcoming BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall, based on the first of Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize-winning novels. Lewis, who became a household name in TV series Homeland, will star opposite Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell. The series charts Cromwell's meteoric rise from blacksmith's son to the king's closest adviser. The six-part mini-series, to be broadcast next year, also includes Mark Gatiss and Jonathan Pryce in the cast. Pryce will play Cromwell's early mentor and protector, Cardinal Wolsey, while Gatiss will play Stephen Gardiner, Secretary to the King.

Anne Boleyn - whose marriage to Henry VIII Cromwell is implicit in securing - will be played by Little Dorrit star Claire Foy, while the ousted Katherine of Aragon will be played by Joanne Whalley. Rylance praised director Peter Kosminsky on his choice of actors: "I feel he has cast Wolf Hall with a superb eye for character and all the nuanced humanity Ms Mantel's masterpieces deserve." Jessica Raine, Richard Dillane and Saskia Reeves are also set to star in the drama. A stage adaptation of Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring Up The Bodies are currently playing in London after a successful opening at Stratford upon Avon. Ben Miles and Nathaniel Parker play Cromwell and Henry VIII respectively in the acclaimed Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation. Mantel is currently writing the third instalment in her Cromwell trilogy, to be entitled Mirror and the Light.

Bring Up the Bodies | Hilary Mantel | Macmillan Bring Up the Bodies Hilary Mantel; Read by Simon Vance Macmillan Audio Powells The sequel to Hilary Mantel's 2009 Man Booker Prize winner and New York Times bestseller, Wolf Hall delves into the heart of Tudor history with the downfall of Anne Boleyn Though he battled for seven years to marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son and her sharp intelligence and audacious will alienate his old friends and the noble families of England. When the discarded Katherine dies in exile from the court, Anne stands starkly exposed, the focus of gossip and malice. At a word from Henry, Thomas Cromwell is ready to bring her down. Over three terrifying weeks, Anne is ensnared in a web of conspiracy, while the demure Jane Seymour stands waiting her turn for the poisoned wedding ring. But Anne and her powerful family will not yield without a ferocious struggle. Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies follows the dramatic trial of the queen and her suitors for adultery and treason.

To defeat the Boleyns, Cromwell must ally with his natural enemies, the papist aristocracy. What price will he pay for Anne's head? Bring Up the Bodies is the winner of the 2012 Man Booker Prize Bring Up the Bodies is one of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Best Books of 2012 and one of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2012 Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, Time Magazine Top 10 Books of the Year, Man Booker Prize Winner, Entertainment Weekly Best Books of the Year, The Independent (UK) Best Books of the Year, Cleveland Plain Dealer's Best Books of the Year, New Yorker Best Books of the Year, Walter Scott Prize Shortlist, Audie Award Winner, Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year, NPR Best Book of the Year, New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year, Costa Book Award - Winner, Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction Shortlist, Washington Post Best Books of the Year, USA Today Best Books of the Year, Women's Prize for Fiction - Shortlist CONNECT WITH Falcons Wiltshire, September 1535 His children are falling from the sky.

He watches from horseback, acres of England stretching behind him; they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze. Grace Cromwell... Watch Trailer for Wolf Hall (BBC/PBS Masterpiece) Watch the trailer for Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall! Wolf Hall premieres January 21st on BBC 2 in the UK and April 5th on PBS Masterpiece in the USA. Reviews Praise for Bring Up the Bodies “This second volume in Hilary Mantel's planned trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, right-hand man to Henry VIII of England, is a perfect marriage of the written and spoken word…Simon Vance's silken tones and expert pacing keep us engaged throughout…Vance enhances the story with instructive vocal portraits of key players and a listenable tempo that keeps us clear and entranced until the end.” —AudioFile Magazine, winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award “Can one improve Hilary Mantel's tale of Tudor intrigue, Bring Up the Bodies, which has racked up both sales and awards? Well, yes, if you add Simon Vance's acclaimed voice.

In an Audie-nominated performance, Vance doesn't simply narrate the Man Booker winner – he seems to inhabit the characters.” —USA Today, four out of four stars “If you listened to Simon Slater's riveting reading of the Booker Prize-wining ‘Wolf Hall,' the 2009 opener in Hilary Mantel's trilogy, the news that the sequel has a different narrator won't be good. Fear not. Simon Vance's narration is every bit as versatile and nuanced as Slater's, his intonation for each character is as uncannily distinctive – a critical requirement with so many characters. Even better, Vance's voice portrayal of the historically maligned Thomas Cromwell, chief adviser to King Henry VII, is almost indistinguishable from Slater's in ‘Wolf Hall'” —Newark Star-Ledger “We all know the story, but hearing it described through Cromwell's eloquent words and inner thoughts on power and ambition, his own included, make it new again, and riveting. Mantel's language is extraordinary – it's as though she's channeled Cromwell from beyond and burrowed into his mind – and Simon Vance's impeccable reading is a perfect match.

A wonderful way to celebrate audio month.” —BookPage “Narrator Simon Vance's skillful presentation enhances Mantel's outstanding description and dialogue. His gorgeous sound, tone and accent add to the beauty and horror of the compelling story.” —Library Journal, starred review “Narrator Simon Vance shines in his portrayal of the characters, creating a range of distinct voices – including the increasingly tense Anne Boleyn and the earnest Georgey, Cromwell's mild-mannered young son who is eager to prove himself. Best of all, however, are the measured tones Vance employs for the conniving Cromwell. The narrator captures the soul of this complex character, a man of innate pragmatism and confidence who is also quietly haunted by regrets. Vance also nails the bone-dry wit of the characters.

In all, this is an exemplary audiobook.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “Vance takes commence of the complex story, reading Mantel's complicated prose with assurance…Tensions leading up to Anne Bolyn's execution run high, and Vance relays the emotions with precision and grace, showing that he is attuned to the complicated plot.” —Booklist “I downloaded Hilary Mantel's majestic ‘Bring Up the Bodies' and was pleasantly surprised to hear Vance's gentle and authoritative voice once again.

It was like running into an old friend and knowing that we were about to have a long and satisfying visit.” —John Schwartz, The New York Times Book Review Reviews from Goodreads Wolf Hall/Bring up the Bodies, Swan Theatre, review - Telegraph Theatre Reviews Wolf Hall/Bring up the Bodies, Swan Theatre, review Charles Spencer finds the RSC's adaptation of Hilary Mantel's Booker prize-winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies splendidly entertaining and deeply touching 4 Ben Miles as Thomas Cromwell and Lydia Leonard as Anne Boleyn in Wolf Hall Photo: Alastair Muir By Charles Spencer 11:12PM GMT 08 Jan 2014 In my experience there is nothing like doing an Eng Lit degree at Oxford to put you off reading long literary novels. So it was with an initial feeling of resentment that I tackled Hilary Mantel’s two Booker Prize-winning novels about Thomas Cromwell and the Court of Henry VIII over the Christmas break. Together they come in at more than a thousand pages, and for the first fifty pages or so the going is tough. But once you are fully immersed in the historical world she so vividly creates, they are completely enthralling.

Indeed I read the last two hundred pages of the second volume at a single sitting. It is a real feather in the RSC’s cap that they have obtained the stage rights to these books, which have been adapted by Mike Poulton in close collaboration with Mantel herself. Inevitably there are losses in seeing these wonderful books on stage. I missed Mantel’s vivid descriptions of weather, food and the smells and sounds of Tudor England as well as the thought processes of Cromwell’s subtle mind. David Starkey has described Thomas Cromwell as Alastair Campbell with an axe but Mantel makes him a far more interesting figure than that. He is totally loyal to Cardinal Wolsey, even when it will do him harm, a cultivated and religious man who can also wield a knife. He also knows that his luck and his life could end at any moment but is tough enough to live with that knowledge. Ben Miles captures many of these qualities, which also include an attractively dry wit, though I wished Poulton had retained the dramatic opening scene in which the 15 year old Cromwell is brutally beaten by his drunken father and has to escape to Europe to save his life.

I also felt that Miles could have made more of the character’s grief over the death of his wife and children. Related Articles “Bring Up the Bodies”: Hilary Mantel’s power play - Salon.com Monday, May 7, 2012 12:00 AM UTC “Bring Up the Bodies”: Hilary Mantel’s power play The sequel to her Booker-winning "Wolf Hall" is a thrilling exploration of what it took to run Tudor England Topics: Books , Editor's Picks , Hilary Mantel , Historical Fiction , What to Read , Entertainment News “Bring Up the Bodies,” Hilary Mantel’s follow-up to her Man Booker Prize-winning 2009 novel, “Wolf Hall,” is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do. Mantel makes bold not with form — by now meaningful experimentation in that area seems exhausted — but with the very material that brings most readers to novels in the first place: our imaginative identification with fictional characters and the experiences we feel we’re sharing with them. As with “Wolf Hall,” the central character in “Bring Up the Bodies” is Thomas Cromwell, master secretary to King Henry VIII of England.

The son of a drunken, abusive blacksmith, Cromwell has risen about as high as any commoner could hope to, entirely on the strength of his acumen, industry, cunning and resilience. As an often-quoted passage from “Wolf Hall” declares, “He is at home in courtroom and waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.” This is, incidentally, Cromwell’s own assessment, but he’s saved from vanity by the fact that his confidence is not just well-placed but precisely placed; he is the ultimate realist, and he possesses that most potent of assets, an excellent knowledge of himself. In the thousands of fictional retellings of Henry’s reign — most of them focused on his ambitious second wife, Anne Boleyn — Cromwell is typically depicted as a ruthless schemer. He got rid of Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, when Henry wanted Anne, and he got rid of Anne, too, when the time came. The first ejection led to the foundation of the Church of England and the second to the execution of six people.

As Mantel tells it — she describes the novel as “a proposal, an offer,” rather than an assertion of historical truth — Cromwell represents the vanguard of a new era, one in which ability trumps noble birth. He can countenance any number of insults from the arrogant aristocrats he works with because he knows that “chivalry’s day is over. One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the money lender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and the kings are their waiting boys.” He would never dream of voicing such thoughts, of course, and part of the marvel of Cromwell the character is his self-control. “I never forget myself,” he tells the ambassador from the Holy Roman Empire at a moment when his temper has been sorely provoked. “What I do, I mean to do.” The style Mantel employs to write about this exemplar of the will is declarative to the point of bullishness; her voice is his. The character’s allure lies in his energy and his resilience, and it’s thrilling to hitch your readerly perspective to a man who can seemingly do anything and furthermore has the nerve to try.

But if Cromwell is a man of action, he’s also, at age 50, prone to reflection and haunted by the dead. “Bring Up the Bodies” opens with falconry in the picture-book English countryside during the king’s summer “progress” (a sort of nationwide tour) of 1535. Cromwell’s falcons are named after his two daughters, who, with his beloved wife, died in London’s intermittent epidemics. He hasn’t forgotten them, but it’s significant that he’s memorialized them as birds of prey. Above all, Cromwell nurses a grudge against all who participated in the downfall of his mentor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Yet, he is not without warmth. A conscientious and covertly tender householder, he presides over the lives of assorted dependents from various social classes. His carefully concealed soft spot for distressed gentlewomen and exiled court figures like Catherine and her daughter, Mary Tudor, leads him to make small but largely unappreciated efforts on their behalf. We are shown that Cromwell is ruthless — there’s passing mention of hangings in Ireland, among other things — but we also know that he is loyal. This is his saving virtue.

His allegiance is to England and to Henry, who, like the late Cardinal, has recognized his worth and raised him up. Some of the more notorious highlights of Cromwell’s career — the dissolution and sacking of monasteries and other Church property and the execution of Thomas More, depicted in “Wolf Hall” — are cast in this light: England’s riches should belong to the state, not to Rome, and be utilized for the benefit of her king and people. Like a modern Labor Party politician, Cromwell tries to pass poor laws and work programs in the face of mighty resistance from Parliament and the aristocracy. Throughout the first two parts of “Bring Up the Bodies,” this is the Cromwell we accompany. He is the king’s most valued councilor and is effectively running the country. His enemies are preening, scornful and often foolish noblemen, out to promote clannish interests or reconciliation with Rome. Anne Boleyn, his former ally, has turned on him, and turned off the king. “He has always rated Anne highly as a strategist,” Cromwell thinks. “He has never believed in her as a passionate, spontaneous woman. Everything she does is calculated, like everything he does,” yet she has overestimated her own security.

They are two of a kind, perhaps, but unlike him, she has let her success go to her head and will, in consequence, lose both. Discouraged by Anne’s inability to give him a son and harried by the vixenish ways that once enthralled him, Henry falls for Jane Seymour, “a plain young woman with a silvery pallor, a habit of silence and a trick of looking at men as if they represent an unpleasant surprise.” It becomes Cromwell’s job not only to clear the way for Jane to become Henry’s third wife, but to make the king feel that he is justified in discarding a second spouse. Cromwell pursues this goal in the conviction that sooner or later Anne would have come after him and his friends. That’s the setup, but as the interrogation and trials of Anne and her alleged lovers commence, Mantel carries the reader into harrowing territory. Cromwell tricks a foppishly romantic musician into boasting of having slept with the queen (Mantel does not endorse the view that the man was tortured into this admission) and conducts a series of interviews with the four doomed noblemen accused of being her lovers and of plotting against the king.

The four also happen to be Cromwell’s political enemies and, furthermore, key participants in a satirical court entertainment that depicted Cardinal Wolsey being dragged to hell by devils. “He needs guilty men,” Cromwell tells himself. “So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged.” Political horror is not a new literary mode — you can find it in the New Testament as well as in such 20th-century works as George Orwell’s “1984.” However, the protagonist in those stories is invariably the victim. “Bring Up the Bodies” devotes 270 pages to developing its hero, investing the reader in the superiority of his personality and cause, and then ushers him into the interrogator’s chair. Cromwell is contriving to send these people to the scaffold for crimes they quite possibly did not commit, however “guilty” they may be of others. Because he is our man ever bit as much as he is Henry’s man, we are, in some obscure way native to the laws of fiction, implicated. These are not easy chapters to read, although they are magnificently realized.

As assured as her implacable protagonist, Mantel walks the edge of a very sharp knife in the last part of “Bring Up the Bodies.” I don’t believe she cuts her feet on it, but sometimes it felt as if she were cutting mine. It’s impossible to repudiate Cromwell, but embracing him has become infinitely complicated. Of all the many fictional depictions of the moral quandaries involved in the exercise of great power, this may be one of the most disturbing. It comes much closer than any I’ve ever encountered to letting you know how it must feel to manage the fate of a nation: how intoxicating and how very, very perilous. Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com .

Question: Who is the central character of Hilary Mantel?s Booker Prize winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies?
Answer: THOMAS CROMWELL